Young and Beautiful
by BumbleLellie
Summary: Bethyl! Looking over her shoulder she could see his legs, tangled in the sheets from earlier activities and finally resting after months stuck in a perpetual doomsday. They were safe now. She couldn't miss that sleeping. But her small lips weren't smiling. She was just restless, an earth-real being trapped in this world. And there was nothing that he could do to save her.


_**So this is the result of working yourself to illness, and having to be in bed for the second half of a day. I seem to love doing Bethyl one-shots so I hope you enjoy! xxx**_

Beth got up.

The novel crisp sheets, clean and comforting, they were part of the extinct world. Their cool caress, the stiffness they harboured as she moved herself to the side of the bed. Something from a million worlds away to the one she belonged to. Her bare feet touched the ground, cold in its own hard-wood way, but she didn't flinch. She was naked and the cool breeze hit her sweating body, the July heat still mingled in the midnight air. And it was all quiet.

Years ago, but not all that long ago at all, she'd spend the summer months travelling with her family. This summer was stagnant. Just the two of them in some dolled up house that had fortunately never been broken into- until the previous week. The dusty pictures of the pyramids and Rome's coliseum, made her long for a culture so before her own but still more civilised to what she had here. Not that he didn't try, he wanted her to be happy- that much was totally undoubted. And she tried to be, honestly she did.

The balcony doors were open, at her own earlier insistence. Nothing could climb up to the third floor to get them, and the world was too warm for the doors to close her in, to cage her. Perhaps somewhere in the back of her mind she knew then that she wouldn't sleep tonight. That she'd slip onto the balcony, bare as the day she was born, with her golden hair flowing down her back clean after so many months being tied back. It hadn't been this good in so long, could that be the reason she found rest couldn't captivate her. She didn't want to sleep and miss this glorious chance, living normally with a man who loved her.

Looking over her shoulder she could see his legs, tangled in the sheets from earlier activities and finally resting after months stuck in a perpetual doomsday. They were safe now. She couldn't miss that sleeping. But her small lips weren't smiling. The chill of the wrought iron balcony as she stared out into the darkness wasn't felt, her body registered the shock of the rusted chill but her mind only looked to the sea of stars stretching further and further out. Sighing she checked for more, no lights none at all. Once she had wondered what the skies would look like without the borders of Atlanta city's lights- now she wanted the lights back. Without them it was too vast, too big and too empty. There was no comfort in the never-ending existence of the sky, but she would nonetheless want nothing less to die staring into their abyss.

Beth leant back, once again checking over her shoulder to check he remained where he was. Still sleeping, still resting, still there. She ran her hands over the marbled scars on the top of her thighs. The straight lines created with a man-made knife as they told her that the prize of her beauty was to be their love. She hadn't felt beautiful, red puffy face from the desperate cries and mottled body from their man handling. She was all an expanse of pale now. Once again almost totally unmarred but for those never-ceasing lines. He said she was beautiful anyway, but beauty meant nothing to her now, not like it had.

That was her worth. Beauty.

She grew up, egotistically, as the pretty one. Her blonde hair and big blue eyes got her what she needed in high school, dates and friends, enough popularity to distract the aching loss of meaning. And it was all she was going to need to get a husband and children, a part-time job for her clinical future. She could barter need instead of want, it didn't matter what she wanted back then. The apocalypse made her understand beauty couldn't save you, but it left you with outstretched hand to hold onto the need that was unmistakably aching in your heart.

She missed the rushed days of awful tragedy, of running place to camp, and camp to place with him. Her first drink, the reckless wildness of doing all that they hadn't done together. The wind in her hair and the adrenaline as they ran together, the joy of finding food and fighting over the past. Things that didn't matter. His passion was misconstrued then, coming off as cruel when he only wanted to survive. Their pain intermingled to counteract one another, but it made time understand themselves. They were free then, wild and total unabashed. His bright-eyed teasing and play with one another as if they were no more than children. That's when she fell for him, and he for her.

But fear prevails, more often than not, to make two people in love refuse to recognise the cold hard facts. So they spent weeks staring, praying the other would slip up first so they didn't have to put their own neck on the chopping board. He cracked first, or perhaps it was her absence, the night he ran after her and kept searching until he got to them. Two days too late to have saved her the fate she was unduly given. Perhaps it was the way it goes, his anger and rampage against the world ruining her made it impossible for his rage to not blurt out is feelings. Hearing that had woken her from her surrendered stupor, brought her back from the dead.

The pain hadn't gone, her numbness from being taken. What they did to her. She didn't feel real anymore, the dark made it more evident. It was

What could she offer him now? She was young and soft, an unaged beauty from the past life that could remind them all how it once had been the survival of the handsomest, not fittest. But the days slipped by and she only found it making her more and more bitter, it was twisting her insides and the hope that she was weaned on was no longer there to be a comfort at all. He couldn't love her then.

But Daryl surprised her, he didn't buy into the crap about style and substance being inevitably interlinked that way. Part of her needed to create the distance by telling herself that he was just like all the others he was in this because their souls were twinned by some romantic fate as the fairy-tales told her they would be. But her soul was aching, lost in her own pain and swimming with the destruction of the now. If anyone understood it should be him.

She repeated that to herself, though it made little sense so that she could hardly believe it at all. He loved her, but what reason was their too? She had the proof, the gentle intimate kisses and the change from gruffness just for her. He told her enough times in a day as if he knew somewhere that the smile and repeat meant she didn't believe him. So he kept trying, kept saying it so she'd know. And like the awful person she was, it wasn't enough to make her believe.

She looked back at the stars, trying to scrunch her eyes to make out heaven as she did when she was young. Part of her questioned her faith, but the stubborn need to not let all of herself change kept her fast in reminding herself He did exist and there was a reason for all this suffering. She hoped that's where she went when she died, if she held on to believing long enough even walker souls would be allowed in. Hers, and Daryl's too. Though he oft enough said he didn't feel he believed his place up there she figured begging would have to do. Either they both went or she was condemned to hell with him, if that was the pace he thought he deserved.

As if he knew her thoughts were trailing elsewhere than their bed, Daryl slipped beside her. Smoothly and effortlessly leaning himself against the bars. She knew eventually he would wake up and join her, he wasn't stupid enough to say anything. But his presence was like the sun, burning hot and too painful to acknowledge in its entirety. He was life, and he was her destruction. Like a child she let him take her hand, stroking it gently with his large thumbs and pull her from the freezing edge.

Once when he'd find her like this she would sob and he would yell at her, the fear bubbling in him that she'd do something stupid to take herself from him. Her robotic nothingness and passivity still worried him, but not the same way. She was just restless, an eartreal being trapped in this world. And there was nothing that he could do to save her, nothing but hold her till morning and the melancholy moon lost its grip on her heart. Then she'd fade back into her confident Beth-ishness. But the early hours wouldn't give him her.

Beth slipped back into the sheets, warmed from his radiating heat. They pained her cooled bones, aching dully like a heartbeat in her legs. He pulled her nearer to his stinging heat, her back pressed against his chest and hands encasing her own in big calloused one. The other hand trailed to move her hair out her face, lightly brushing her cheek with a single finger.

The doubt in her mind spoke out, the aching need to torment herself. Will you still love me when I'm no longer young and beautiful?

He was asleep again, trapping her mercilessly in his arms- because she needed that to stay here. And she didn't mind, eyes open and staring at the white-wash wall covered in shadows. She knew he loved her, would remain to. That practical reasoning liked to believe she was more than a pretty face to keep around, that he asked complex questions about how she saw the world to know her- not her face. Daryl Dixon didn't appreciate beauty in the way those men did, he cherished her- that's why she was saved. But what if he followed her for that reason exactly?

Will you still love me when I'm no longer young and beautiful?

_**Reviews would be a lovely if you're a kind-hearted person :3 **_


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